Word: communism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite my arrest, and to the horror of my parents, I returned to New York something of a convert. I was only joking when I flashed my Communist Party card -- it was actually a Lenin Library card -- but Communism in theory was appealing: everybody works for the greater good, no one is allowed to go hungry or homeless or jobless, no one gets rich at another's expense. Contrast that with, in today's terms, millions of homeless in America and television producer Aaron Spelling's building a $50 million house for himself in Los Angeles...
...thing about Communism is that it doesn't work. It tries to change human nature. This is its fundamental flaw. People are selfish. Give them an incentive to work, and they will. Give them a low-risk way to cheat on their taxes, and they will. We do, most of the time, what's in our own selfish best interest...
...gesture that was at once magnanimous and a bit slighting (as well as rather amazing), told the New York Times that he would match the $25 million in direct U.S. economic aid. The $145 million in Bush's gift bag for easing Poland and Hungary away from Communism was dwarfed last week by the $70 billion the Air Force requested for the Stealth bomber program and by the $43 billion for the Third World that Japan offered at the Paris summit...
...toward the Soviet Union. "Gorbachev makes it possible for us to move ahead," confided one of the Communists to Bush. "We appreciate your keeping a good relationship with him." It seemed, as Bush hurried along his route, that his hosts gained nerve and expressed not only their conviction that Communism was a botch but also their uncertainty about how to untangle their political and economic messes. "We are where you were in 1776," Hungary's party president, Rezso Nyers, told Bush. "We need a currency that is convertible. The question is, Can we get it fast enough to keep things...
During the postwar "Pax Americana," Washington's world role largely involved resisting Communism through a network of military alliances. That period is passing, being replaced by what has been dubbed a "Fax Americana." America's influence will derive, in part, from its role as an exemplar of ideas and a purveyor of information. Ronald Reagan, in a speech in London last month, talked about how "electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it were lace." In Bratislava, Czechoslovak students sometimes drop by the city's new hotel, equipped for international television reception, where the maids let them watch...